The Bone Artists Read Free Page B

varying heights scattered across the lowest shelf.
    Oliver gasped as the room and all that was in it flared to life.
    “Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
    “Kind of inappropriate, mm? Given the circumstances,” his friend chided playfully. “Stop gawking, we have shit to take care of.”
    “Sorry, it’s just . . .” Horrifying .
    The word died on his lips but stayed vivid in his mind. The wall was covered in pieces of human beings, or rather, plastic and wood and glass parts of former owners. Prosthetics. Plaster feet, plaster hands, masks, arms, even glass eyeballs skewed and directionless, watching him under the warm glow of the candles. Most of the hands and feet hung from metal hooks pushed into the plaster.
    A chipped, yellowed statue of Mary presided over the collection from a nearby corner.
    “I’d heard about this place, just didn’t realize it would look like this,” he said, approaching the abandoned relics slowly.
    Micah, meanwhile, had shoved his face close to what appeared to be a carved wooden peg leg. He squinted, peering over his glasses and twisting his head, trying to read something on its side. “Yeah. Freaky, huh? They’re mostly just repros. Thanks for healing my hand, Saint Roch, here’s a model of it. It’s a little easier to swallow in the daylight.”
    Somehow Oliver doubted that.
    Not that he was a stranger to odd artifacts—his father’s shop was full of the stuff, little taxidermied raccoons and alligator claws and bird skeletons. . . . But there was something differentabout these left-behind pieces. He reached out and, with trembling fingers, touched one of the smooth, white hands. He shuddered; it was warm to the touch, heated by the candles, but felt as if it had just been plucked from a living owner.
    “So who was this Roland person anyway?” Oliver murmured, recoiling from the wall.
    Micah didn’t seem to mind doing the bulk of the work, searching along the wall for his target. “Does it matter? We just need to find his hand thingie and his fingers.”
    “Wait. Fingers? You don’t actually mean—”
    Snorting, Micah shot him a wry look, finally unhooking a plaster-cast hand from the right corner of the shrine. “Do you honestly think grabbing this thing off the wall is worth two grand to someone? Come on, Oliver. Use your head.”
    He felt suddenly queasy, watching Micah stuff the hand in his backpack, the open zipper revealing a sliver of a small garden trowel. The other boy leaned down and blew out the candles, leaving them abruptly in darkness, the shrine filtered through coils of smoke.
    “I thought we were just taking stuff , not bones. That’s messed up.”
    And it’s not what I signed up for.
    Micah crossed to him, his face hovering just an inch or so away, his eyes a dull, dark gray as they roamed over Oliver’s face. Then he clapped Oliver on the shoulder and shrugged, nodding toward the jimmied window behind him. “I don’t like it either, man, but do you honestly want to back out now?”
    Immediately he thought of Briony, of getting on her bad side.
    “These aren’t good people, Ollie,” Micah was saying, going tohold the window open for him to crawl through. “They do shit I do not agree with. There are forces they play with that guys like you and guys like me do not get. That we have no business trucking in. They ain’t called Bone Artists because they carve wood .”
    Oliver nodded, pulling in a shaky breath. “I get it. I’m just not sure I can—”
    “I’ll do it,” Micah told him in a soft, strange voice, pitying, maybe. “Just keep watch. It’ll be slower that way, but at least we won’t get caught.”

 

O liver was beginning to sweat heavily in his sweatshirt.
    It was the humidity, sure, but it was also the sounds. He listened to the scraping of Micah’s trowel as he dug out the corner grave in the cemetery. Try as he might, he couldn’t drown out the sounds—the shhesh-shhush as Micah made piles of the displaced dirt, the